Gmail is finally back up, following a five hour outage that left frustrated users unable to send or receive emails.  

According to DownDetector, the issues started at around 08:44 BST, and have just been resolved. 

Speaking to MailOnline, a Google spokesperson said: 'On Friday November 12 around 08:30 am UTC, some of our users experienced a service disruption to Google Cloud services, including Google Workspace. 

'This issue is now resolved.'

Andrius Ulenskas, Technical Director at Hyve Managed Hosting, said: 'Google, Gmail and YouTube going down today is simply another addition to the list of recent tech outages. 

'If anything, this should really highlight how our growing reliance on a select few companies is making the internet more and more fragile.

'This recent uptick in outages shows that any business is vulnerable to outages when they rely solely on one provider for all their key services.'

Several frustrated users took to Twitter to discuss this morning's outage.

Many appeared to be getting a 502 error when trying to access their emails, that read: 'The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.'

While the issue appeared to affect UK users predominantly, others reported problems getting into Gmail from other countries including Spain and Kenya.